Great American Novel

Send us Fan Mail F. Scott Fitzgerald's  Tender Is the Night  (1934) has always sparked great debate about whether it is a noble botch or a modernist classic because its non-chronological form, confounding character motivation, and intrusive narrative voice all seem so compellingly imperfect. In 1951 the literary critic Malcolm Cowley even published a "corrected" edition in which he...

Send us Fan Mail   Episode 40 of the Great American Novel Podcasts discusses one of the great American novels of the Twentieth Century, one that is perhaps more significant and relevant now than it has been in quite some time.  In this episode your feckless hosts discuss All the King’s Men, Robert Penn Warren’s 1946 Pulitzer Prize winning novel.  Warren tells the story of Willie Stark, a country b...

Send us Fan Mail In 1997 Philip Roth entered a brilliant late phrase of a career that no one really saw coming. While certainly one of the greats of later twentieth century American fiction, he was widely seen as spinning variations on his favorite fixations, sex and women (not necessarily in that order). But with American Pastoral he took on history and into the lives of solid citizens a force of...

Send us Fan Mail And now for something completely different.  In its 38th episode, the Great American Novel Podcast throws away its foundational genre with no more regard for decorum than cats and dogs shacking up in sheer defiance of the apocalypse. In this episode we instead consider a host of short story collections held to be so coherent, so cohesive, and so excellent that they are often consi...

Send us Fan Mail Walker Percy's 1961 debut novel The Moviegoer ---which shocked the literary world when it came out of nowhere to win the National Book Award against some stiff competition---may strike contemporary readers as an elusive novel. The first-person, present-tense voice feels contemporary enough, but the narrator, the New Orleans stockbroker John Bickerson "Binx" Bolling,...

Send us Fan Mail It’s 1976. A woman named Reno in leather motorcycle gear descends upon the Bonneville Salt Flats on a state of the art Moto Valera motorcycle. Is speed her goal?  Is it the land art created by her tracks across the flats?  Is her rolling crash meant to serve as a metaphor for the next two years of her life?  In this episode your intrepid hosts return to an era and setting that at...

Send us Fan Mail Ernest Hemingway's 1929 novel A Farewell to Arms is probably the most famous war novel in American literary history. Inspired by his own wounding on the Italian front shortly before his nineteenth birthday, Hemingway tells the story of a disillusioned American serving in a foreign army, Frederic Henry, who falls in love with a Red Cross nurse, Catherine Barkley, shortly befor...

Send us Fan Mail In this, our 34th episode of the Great American Novel podcast, the hosts tackle Colson Whitehead’s intriguing, interesting, and in some surprising ways challenging award-winning 2016 novel, The Underground Railroad.  This novel works with the premise that the antebellum freedom trail to the north for escaped slaves was not a series of safe houses and hiding spaces with the occasio...

Send us Fan Mail More celebrated for her dark, satirical short stories, Flannery O'Connor nevertheless burst on the literary scene in 1952 in her mid-twenties with her debut novel, Wise Blood . The story of a would-be preacher resistant to God's grace, the plot features some of the most bizarre and twisted left turns in American literature: self-blindings with lye, underaged ingenues nam...

Send us Fan Mail In Episode 32 of the Great American Novel podcast, we slip through time with Billy Pilgrim as we shuffle between the character’s experiences as a prisoner of war and first hand witness to the Dresden firebombing in World War II and then trip the light fantastic to the far flung planet Tralfamadore.  Or…do we?  Yes, this episode has your intrepid explorers hiding in Kurt Vonnegut’s...

Send us Fan Mail Few novels have had the cultural impact of Jack Kerouac's speed-fueled mad dash across the continent in search of kicks as On the Road . One doubts the 1960s ever would have happened had Kerouac's Beat Generation coterie not inspired a mass embrace (and mockery) of bohemian jazz culture rebelling against the conformity of Eisenhower-era conservatism and Atomic Age anxiet...

Send us Fan Mail A couple of weeks ago—after this episode was recorded, but before it was edited and posted—the famous author Stephen King posted online his top ten novels of all time—and among them was Katherine Anne Porter’s Ship of Fools.  This 1962 book was the first novel by Porter, a great American writer who had mostly worked in the short story genre and as a journalist and editor.  The nov...

Send us Fan Mail The Red Badge of Courage (1895) is a singularly unique war novel: whereas most depictions of the horrors of combat and the trauma of the battlefield are naturalistic, attempting to inflict upon the reader the violence the prose describes and terrifying us with the prospect that humans do not rise to heroic occasions, Stephen Crane's novel is impressionistic, blurring detail a...

Send us Fan Mail The Great American Novel Podcast episode 28 considers JD Salinger’s landmark 1951 classic, The Catcher in the Rye.  Your hosts discuss Salinger’s famous reclusiveness, the book’s continuing appeal, and its influence on both the genre of so-called “young adult literature” and post-breakdown lit.  We examine the novel in its role of the creation of the American teenager as a marketi...

Send us Fan Mail Often hailed as the quintessential exemplum of Reagan-era postmodernism, Don DeLillo's eighth novel, White Noise (1985), is part academic satire, part media excoriation, and part exploration of the "simulacrum" or simulated feel of everyday life. With its absurdist asides on the iconicity of both Elvis and Hitler, the unrelenting stress of consumer choices (the supe...

Send us Fan Mail The 26th episode of the Great American Novel Podcast delves into Carson McCullers’ 1940 debut novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Published when the author was only 23, the novel tells the tale of a variety of misfits who don’t seem to belong in their small milltown in depression-era, 1930s Georgia.  Tackling race, disability, sexuality, classism, socialism, the novel catapulted M...

Send us Fan Mail Published in 1881, The Portrait of a Lady was Henry James's seventh novel and marked his transition away from the novel of manners that only three years earlier had made his novella Daisy Miller a succès de scandale toward the more meticulous, inward study of individual perception, or what would come to be known as psychological realism. The story of an independence-minded yo...

Send us Fan Mail Great American Novel Podcast 24 considers Joan Didion’s 1970 novel Play It as It Lays, which shut the door on the 60s and sped down the freeway into the 70s, eyes on the rearview mirror all the while.  In a wide-ranging discussion which touches not only upon Didion and her screenwriter husband but also John Wayne, Ernest Hemingway, the Manson cult, the Mamas and the Papas and Lloy...

Send us Fan Mail William Faulkner's fifth published novel, As I Lay Dying (1930), is a self-described tour de force that the author cranked out in roughly two months while working as the night manager at the University of Mississippi power plant in his hometown of Oxford. This dark tragicomedy about a family on a quest to bury its matriarch helped win the author his early reputation for sadis...

Send us Fan Mail In Great American Novel Podcast Episode 22, we wrestle with the old Thoreau quote "The majority of men lead lives of quiet desperation" as we delve into the soul-sapping mid-century suburbs in Richard Yates' 1961 novel Revolutionary Road.  Join the hosts for a  conversation that considers other suburban chroniclers such as Updike and Cheever and other  treatments fr...

Send us Fan Mail Only thirty years old this year, Ernest J. Gaines' A Lesson Before Dying (1993) is a powerful testament to social justice and to the search for individual dignity in an oppressive legal system. Set in the late 1940s in a small Louisiana community, the book tells the story of two men, one a convicted murderer on death's row (Jefferson) and the other his reluctant tutor (G...

Send us Fan Mail In Great American Novel Podcast Episode 20, your fearless (or is it feckless) hosts find themselves in the damp swamps and thick scrublands of north central Florida in the post-Reconstruction era as we struggle to survive with the settlers of the brush country in Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' Pulitzer Prize winning 1938 novel, The Yearling. We discuss how this Maryland native cam...

Send us Fan Mail Season three kicks off with a fiftieth anniversary celebration of Thomas Pynchon's postmodernist whirl-a-gig Gravity's Rainbow . Originally published on February 28, 1973, this encyclopedic inquiry into the systematicity of existence, power, and technology was just this week described by Esquire as "one of the weirdest, richest, most frustrating, inscrutable, brilli...

Send us Fan Mail In Great American Novel Podcast Episode 18, our final Season 2 episode, we plunge ourselves into New Orleans of the fin de siècle in Kate Chopin's 1899 novel The Awakening. Edna Pontellier wrestles with a life she never chose, beset by a bore of a husband, a flimsy excuse for a lover, and a patriarchal society which has tried to restrain her choices to almost nothing. One of...

Send us Fan Mail Saul Bellow's 1953 breakthrough novel The Adventures of Augie March is perhaps, of all the great American novels we've discussed, the one whose cultural imprint has faded the most. Even among Bellow fans this freewheeling exploration of American identity tends to take a backseat to subsequent classics such as Herzog (1964) and Humboldt’s Gift (1975).  Yet for readers who...